March 17, 1998
Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, New York

For me personally this is a day of special joy. My joy derives incrementally from many factors: from Rabbi Zimmerman's gracious invitation for this occasion extended around the time last month when I reached my seventieth birthday; -- I can't believe it was my seventieth, because I really do not feel a day older than sixty-nine; from the fact that this is the third time through the years that I have been privileged to be the Founder' Day speaker as a member of the faculty of this distinguished yeshiva; from the fact that the three invitations came from three successive presidents of this College-Institute; but more than anything else, from the fact that the first of these presidents, Rabbi Nelson Glueck, [hebrew] was my beloved teacher; the second, Rabbi Alfred Gottschalk, [hebrew] may he be blessed with a long and healthy life, was my classmate, ordained with me in 1957, and the third, Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman, [hebrew] may the days of his life be many and good, was my beloved student.

It is further a great privilege for me, an ordinee of our Cincinnati School and a consequent beneficiary of the legacy of Isaac Mayer Wise, to be asked to speak during the seventy-fifth anniversary year of Stephen Samuel Wise's founding of the Jewish Institute of Religion, now the New York school of our College-Institute, at which I have happily spent most of my teaching career. I have also been privileged to serve as the rabbi, albeit on an interim basis for a year, at the the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, the mother of our New York school, during which time I repeatedly tested that synagogue's vaunted claim of a completely free pulpit, and found that claim to be invulnerable even to my most outrageous fulminations.

The downside for anyone choosing to preach rather than lecture on Founders' Day, is that you have a good chance of drawing this week's Torah portion, Vayakhel, in the Book of Exodus, with its description, while the ancient Israelites were still in the wilderness, of the construction of their glorious Sanctuary, in great detail, and more detail, and more detail, and yet more detail and still more detail. But then again, perhaps through divine Providence or simple serendipity the parasha seems to be most appropriate for Founders' Day, for the founders of our yeshiva, in their vision and creativity, appear to be reincarnations of two giant architects of the wilderness construction:: the one Bezaleel, whom we know as Betsalel in Hebrew, and the other Aholiab, whom our Hebrew text calls Aholiav? For like their counterparts in the biblical wilderness, did not Isaac Mayer Wise and Stephen Samuel Wise, each in his own day, face a community irreparably divided, where many delusively hankering for a romanticized past, where others cowered before an inscrutable future, while most of the community was enfeebled with hunger and with thirst, not a hunger for bread, as our prophet Amos was to put it, not a thirst for water; no, not that kind of hunger or that kind of thirst, but a hunger and a thirst for spiritual sustenance, a hunger and a thirst for the words of the living God?

If this wilderness community in search of God survived and later thrived to unanticipated renewal, was this not because its provident leadership took God's word seriously? For, in apparent remedy for the people's wilderness malaise, God had previously directed Moses, saying "Let them build Me a sanctuary," and made a promise, "And I will dwell in their midst." "Let them build Me a sanctuary," and I will dwell in their midst."

And it was this sanctuary -- tabernacle, ark, and all the rest -- whose construction Moses entrusted to Bezaleel and Aholiab,-- who are described in the our Torah portion as wise, skilled and understanding, at the top of their profession as it were, which means that in all likelihood they had served with distinction in their respective capacities for at least twenty-five years.

Yet how could Bezaleel and Aholiab build a sanctuary in the desert? They were commanded to fashion the sanctuary from precious fabrics, luminous metals and iridescent stones, but how could these be obtained amidst the arid sands of their wilderness, especially after so many of the people had expended all their hoarded treasures on their idolatrous Golden Calf? Clearly, as history would confirm, the sanctuary that Bezaleel and Aholiab were planning did not arise until centuries later on Zion's hill. But would the later materialization of this sanctuary have been possible had not Bezaleel and Aholiab laid its foundations long before, with the concretized ideals of their people's highest aspirations? Only so could they fulfill the divine directive "Let them build Me a sanctuary," And be reassured of God's promise "And I shall dwell in their midst."

What faith it must have taken for Bezaleel and Aholiab to build their sanctuary, tabernacle, ark and all the rest, -- for unborn generations, for uncharted territory and for unknown challenges! And what courage it must have taken so to innovate amidst their surrounding disorientation! For surely Bezaleel and Aholiab could not have failed to realize that with the progress of their plans their retrogressive coreligionists would choose sectarianism and while those who despaired of the future would drift toward assimilation. Yet they drove on. They drove on, saddened by their inevitable losses, yet in optimistic anticipation of demographic no less than spiritual growth, adamantly determined to comply with God's directive "Let them make Me a sanctuary," and confident of God's promise "And I will dwell in their midst."

And if through our people's labyrinthine odyssey we, the children of Israel, have managed to maintain an identity that binds us to our matriarchs and our patriarchs, and makes all Israel kith and kin, is it not because in each epoch and each generation, in every continent and in every locale, there have arisen Bezalels and Aholiabs, Isaac Mayers and Stephen Samuels? Amidst the challenges of our successive surroundings, to our knowledge, our mores, our values and our faith, these inspired leaders of our people have conceived new sanctuaries of healing and sanctuaries of idealism, which have relevantly and cogently expressed the eternal verities of our Sacred Tradition in the common idiom of their day.

How similar is the task of all Bezaleels and Aholiabs today, all of you and all of us, who have been blessed to reach or pass the putative pinnacle of our professional service. How well we know of the disorientation in our contemporary Jewish life. It is a disorientation the like of whose intensity we Jews, inured though we are to change, have not experienced since the days of the Greco-Roman world. It is a disorientation brought on in no small measure by our age of enveloping globalism, which is profoundly challenging the ways of life and values of previous generations, which has been turning the world into a computerized village, and which is transforming all world Jewry, in Israel, America and other communities small and large, as never before, into a single universal entity, whose components can be in as close communication with one another as were the ancient Israelites in the Wilderness.

And in this strange world of kaleidoscopic transformation, do we not ache at the now all too familiar effect of wilderness malaise upon our people, so many of whom are obsessed with the golden calf of their self-imposed sectarianism, so many of whom grasp at the elusive mirage of seamless assimilation, and nearly all of whom are caught in the hunger and thirst of a debilitating divisiveness where God's presence cannot possibly be expected to dwell? In such a world, with full recognition that, as throughout the past, there must inevitably be losses, is it not incumbent upon us, the heirs of the evolving, adaptive and responsive liberal tradition which we believe to have been the marrow and life of our faith throughout the ages,...is it not incumbent upon us, who would be worthy of the founders of our yeshiva, in contemplation of the endless possibilities for spiritual and demographic growth that the future appears to open before us,...is it not incumbent upon us, to begin to build the sanctuary for our future, like Bezaleel and Aholiab,... not with the arid sands of the contemporary wilderness of Jewish religious life, but with the concretized ideals of our Sacred Tradition's noblest aspirations:

1. Not with divisiveness, but with unity;

2. Not with bigotry, but with acceptance;

3. Not with zealotry, but with humility;

4. Not with intransigence, but with flexibility;

5. Not with exclusion, but with embrace;

6. Not with discrimination, but with equality;

7. Not with degradation, but with ennoblement;

8. Not with impediment, but with empowerment;

9. Not with pettiness, but with magnanimity;

10. Not with dogmatism, but with intelligence;

11. Not with obscurantism, but with enlightenment;

12. Not with superficiality, but with profundity;

13. Not with superstition, but with understanding;

14. Not with formalism, but with substantiality;

And above all, Not with malevolence, but with compassion?

And when we so build, would it not do well for us to bear in mind, the example of Moses, who according to our Tradition, exercised a certain a certain hubris toward heaven, when he supervised the construction of the Wilderness Sanctuary. The Talmud tells us that, in contradiction to God's command that the tabernacle be erected before the ark, Moses wanted Bezaleel and Aholiab to construct the ark first........and, we must concede, not without ample justification. For Moses knew, as all the builders of our sanctuaries from his day to ours have learned, that it is not the edifice that makes the sanctuary, no, not its facade, nor its boardroom, nor its social hall, nor its early childhood center, nor its youth lounge, nor its museum, not even its auditorium or its library of holy books, important as all these, singly and collectively, may be for the mission of the sanctuary. What makes the sanctuary is nothing other than the ark which contains that which the sanctuary has traditionally been about: our sacred Torah, the or zarua, the stored light from whose illumination our Midrash, under the influence of Plato, tells us that God created the world, to which we moderns, under the influence of astrophysicists, now often like to add that it all happened some fourteen billion earth years ago...give or take a few months, I suppose.

In today's liberal Jewish world where the priorities of our sanctuaries are all too often woefully misguided, where egregiously secular pursuits are all too often lavishly promoted while Torah learning and Torah living are all too often shamelessly trivialized, and where the expressive vocabulary of our general environment is all too often harnessed not to illuminate but to obfuscate the distinctiveness of our Jewish faith, which is Torah, is it not the sacred obligation of all of us, who willy-nilly must bear responsibility for the sanctuary of the future,..... for the sake of the survival of our faith, at every opportunity, to declare and demonstrate:

That our covenant is Torah;

That our commitment is Torah;

That our spirituality is Torah;

That our banner is Torah;

That our cachet is Torah;

That our signature is Torah;

That our heritage is Torah;

That our identity is Torah;

That our mission is Torah;

That our message is Torah;

That our program is Torah;

That our objective is Torah;

That our fulfillment is Torah;.

And that our only legacy worth leaving can only be Torah,...

Torah, of course, not in its constricted definition of five biblical books endlessly dissectible by academic scalpels, but Torah in its comprehensive connotation as the sublime oasis for all who thirst and all who hunger in the wilderness of spiritual life, fountainhead and granary of our Sacred Tradition, supple, flexible, evolving, and perennially contemporary in its cogent engagement of the exigencies of every unanticipated moment with the eternal ideals of our Jewish faith, ideals whose golden essence, was never better expressed that by our sage Hillel who in the vernacular of his day declared: Do no harm.

What you do not want done to you do not do to another.